Waitoki, WaikaremoanaRata, AramaRoa, ThomasAlam-Simmons, Ara2026-07-162026-07-162025https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18456This project records the experiences of South Asian women in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and what those experiences reveal about the possibilities and limits of solidarity with Māori and other racialised women under conditions of settler colonialism and white supremacy. This work is a response to my own relational experiences as a South Asian woman living in Aotearoa, and to the conversations that have emerged from years of active community involvement. This project centres women's voices through the lens of Indigenous, Black, and women-of-colour feminist thinking and praxis. Using a toolkit methodology comprising collaging, one-to-one conversations, found poetry, and autoethnography, the study engaged fifteen South Asian women across three interconnected sites of inquiry. The first explored how South Asian women make sense of their own experiences of colonisation and what it might mean to reclaim identity outside of colonial narratives. The second took a look at women's relationships with other racialised women, including Māori women, to understand what those relationships reveal about the conditions under which solidarity becomes possible, conditional, or foreclosed. The third drew on my own autoethnographic account to illuminate how deliberate acts of remembering, unsettling colonial narratives, resisting co-optation, and being in solidarity can function as a decolonial practice grounded in relational accountability to Māori sovereignty and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The central empirical finding of this thesis is that solidarity among South Asian women and between South Asian women and Māori is not a natural outcome of shared marginalisation or identity. It is a relational practice that is structured, conditional, and sometimes foreclosed by the intersecting dynamics of settler colonialism, caste supremacy, heteropatriarchy, biculturalism, and internalised colonial narratives. Key findings demonstrate that solidarity requires, first, an internal reckoning: healing from internalised oppression, reclaiming ancestral histories, cultural practices, language, and knowledge systems, and developing critical consciousness of complicity within settler-colonial structures. Second, it requires an external and political commitment: confronting caste supremacy within South Asian communities, refusing model minority positioning, and grounding relationships that engages in a political committment to Te Ao Māori and Māori sovereignty, rather than in the false promise of inclusion within settler-colonial frameworks. Additionally, this thesis, locates caste supremacy in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This thesis makes both an empirical and methodological contribution to the Asian-Indigenous solidarities literature. Methodologically, it demonstrates that arts-based approaches can make visible the complexity and diversity of South Asian women's relational lives in ways that conventional qualitative research cannot, offering a practical toolkit that can be taken up in community and activist spaces beyond the university. Conceptually, it offers two frameworks as new contributions to the decolonial solidarities literature. The first extends the whakawhanaungatanga framework developed by Rata and Al-Asaad (2019) by adding two new dimensions. These are restoration, which centres the reclaiming of identity, healing, and spiritual practice as political acts; and reconstruction, which names the need for joint political struggle as the governing horizon of solidarity. The second is a decolonial framework developed through the autoethnographic inquiry. This is made up of four interconnected dimensions: historical remembering, unsettling settler colonial narratives, resisting co-optation, and being in solidarity that is led by Te Ao Māori and accountable to Māori sovereignty. Together, these frameworks offer South Asian and other tauiwi of colour communities practical and political pathways for building solidarities that refuse settler-colonial logics and actively contribute to creating more just and relational ways of living together in Aotearoa.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.South Asian-Indigenous solidaritiesAotearoaSouth Asian Migrant WomenSettlers of colourCaste Supremacyclass consciousnessdecolonial solidaritydecolonial frameworkAsian-Indigenous solidaritiesThesis